Skip Gorman: My way or Highway 178

Tuesday

Feb 18, 2014 at 12:01 AM

This AudioBlogColumn is brought to you by all the Valley's local artisans. Painters, potters, glazers, quilters, woodworkers and metalworkers alike indulge their passions and ply their trade by making beauty inspired by the spirit of this Valley. Encourage and enable their enterprise by purchasing their art. It will keep them off the streets! And speaking of streets . . .

By Skip Gormanskippergorman@gmail.com

Here's another weekly potpourri of thoughts and observations about breaking news and Valley things both great and small . . .

This AudioBlogColumn is brought to you by all the Valley's local artisans. Painters, potters, glazers, quilters, woodworkers and metalworkers alike indulge their passions and ply their trade by making beauty inspired by the spirit of this Valley. Encourage and enable their enterprise by purchasing their art. It will keep them off the streets! And speaking of streets . . .

California Highway 178 begins hopefully and naively near Buck Owens Crystal Palace in Bakersfield. From there it blows town like a lottery winner and snakes through the Kern River Gorge to the wretched mud puddle which used to be Lake Isabella. It saunters past the Onyx General Store with a sigh and heads through Walker's Pass out into the vast Mojave Desert. Thirsty and a bit lost, Highway 178 runs downhill through sleepy Inyokern and heads for the front gate of the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Center. Denied entry, it petulantly turns right, assumes the alias of China Lake Boulevard, and heads south plum through the main drag of Ridgecrest. When it gets to the Denny's Restaurant signpost it turns left and heads east to Trona, Death Valley and Las Vegas all in that very order.

Caltrans (a state entity) has ownership and stewardship of Highway 178 even while it's in the guise of China Lake Boulevard. Did you know that? My truck sure does! Go ahead. Take your vehicle down China Lake Boulevard (a state-maintained road) and then take it down, say, Ridgecrest Boulevard (a city-maintained road). Still got fillings in your teeth? Than try Sunland, but be warned! See, Caltrans takes their roads seriously while Ridgecrest took Measure "L" as a perverted mandate to never spend another cent on road improvement. Or at least that's how it seems.

Well, last week the Fresno Caltrans (District 6) office visited Ridgecrest and hosted an obligatory Public Hearing during the Planning Commission meeting to take public comment on the safety upgrade they have in store for China Lake Boulevard. Actually, the public comment was a bit pro forma. The state has two and a quarter million dollars to spend on China Lake Boulevard medians at a time when the rest of this city's transportation infrastructure is visibly crumbling. But, sadly, there is a relentless bureaucratic momentum to these things. Indeed, if William Shakespeare, Albert Einstein and Jesus Christ were each to approach the podium and rail against the awkward priorities on display here, the deal is by now so firmly "done" that any amount of poetic justice, analytic persuasion, or moral imperative put forth would be met with only a yawn.

Now, the Caltrans people who came visiting are all very nice and well-meaning people. It's their road after all, and they can do whatever they want to with it. I was unable to tell exactly where the new raised medians were going to allow for turns and where they would not. The posters they brought with them were hard to decipher in this regard. I asked their analyst for any and all of the accident data upon which the decision was reached that China Lake Boulevard is unsafe enough to warrant spending two and a quarter million dollars on raised medians. I was assured that the data is forthcoming. I'm looking forward to going through it ,but the comment deadline is just a few weeks from now.

Also, several commenters suggested that the new medians be functionally synthesized first either by painting lines or placing temporary abutments for a while before making any permanent changes to see if, indeed, the planners from Fresno had not made some tragic mistakes to our town's quirky traffic circulation. That suggestion appears to have been met with ambivalence (yawn). Too bad. It made a lot of sense to a former engineer.

Finally, I told them about the community's plans for median art and asked if perhaps accommodations could be left in the medians for the type of petroglyphic figures currently on display along the Drummond median just west of Norma. Now, this discussion continued out in the vestibule with a staff member who seemed willing and even a enthusiastic to do what he could for our median art vision. He also seemed to appreciate that any horticultural median landscaping was currently unpopular hereabouts for several good reasons (water and visibility). So hopefully the overall aesthetics of the China Lake Boulevard portion of Highway 178 could be the overall winner here. And just imagine how wonderfully safe it's all going to be!

That has been this week's AudioBlogColumn, and this is Skip Gorman (skippergorman@gmail.com) returning you all now back to a quieter and gentler place. . .